----- Original Message ----- From:DumboTo:ercgreen
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 5:48 AMSubject: Some Cryptologic History - from DUMBO - that
everyone will enjoy reading by those who were on active duty in
the 60's and were aware of the BURST transmissions.

Found this on the Web - and believe that
you and your ex-ASA and DAYS OF OUR LIVES subscribers will enjoy
this well written article, especially those who were on active
duty and had their TOUR of DUTY in TURKEY extended because of the
Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone else will enjoy it and once they
begin, won't stop until the end.... [DUMBO - is exactly right. Okay, then, how
about those who can remember the BURST transmissions - sit down
and put into words your recollection and knowledge thereof.
I was a 982 in the 60's and remember the term BURST, but that's
about all, except that once in a while a 058 would enter a
comment on his 5-ply about unusual noises during the reception.
You 059's probably know more than anyone. Did anyone ever
get involved? If so, let's hear from you....- - -gH]

By WILLIAM REED With W. Craig ReedI have read volumes about the Cuban Missile
Crisis, but nothing about the Cuban Submarine
Crisis. For good reason. That story has never
been told. It is buried in the vaults of
the National Security Agency. I know. I was
there, and intimately involved. I have waited
almost forty years to tell this story. It
is long overdue. I believe that the general
public has a right to know and understand what
really transpired between President Kennedy and
Soviet Premier Khrushchev: why Kennedy made the
decisions that he did during that conflict, and
why Khrushchev backed down. It had a lot more to
do with submarines and potential long-range
missiles than it had to do with medium-range
ground-based missiles located in Cuba. Never
before revealed to the American public, the
Soviet submarine force played a key (if not the
major) role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Thanks to a NSA Top Secret Codeword
project termed BORESIGHT, every Soviet submarine at sea,
not only those advancing into Cuban waters, but around
the globe, was located and targeted by our own Polaris
missiles. Confronted with this sobering reality,
Khrushchev had no choice but to back down or face World
War Three. This was the secret ace in Kennedys hand
with which he bluffed the Soviet Premier. It was a hell
of a strategic poker game, and should not be buried in
the graveyard of secret history. The Cuban Submarine
Crisis started long before 1962:

In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the new ruler
of the Kremlin, he exercised his new-found power by
appointing Sergei Gorshkov, a seasoned naval veteran at
the relatively young age of 45, as Commander in Chief of
the Soviet Navy. Gorshkov, had earned his sea legs early
in life, attaining the rank of rear admiral at the age of
31. Nikita ... compelled Sergei to begin
dismantling larger surface warships by stating that
these large warships are only useful for hauling
around admirals. In the years that followed many of
the once proud gray veterans of the Soviet Navy were
dismantled and sold as scrap.

Gorshkov pointed his New Navy towards the development of
missile-armed small craft and submarines to counter U.S.
Naval forces then being augmented .... especially
submarines. That was to be the first-line defense
and offense program for the Soviet Navy.

The nuclear-submarine program was put in full swing, but
diesel-powered units were also updated, especially the
deadly Foxtrot class, which could stay submerged for ten
hoursor more, operating on batteries, during which time
she was considered to be virtually undetectable.

November, 1960, Karamursel, Turkey

Weve lost them!
Youre kidding.
Commander, I kid you not. Been over two weeks
now, and not one peep. Weve lost them.
Reed, you cant just lose a Russian submarine
... especially not a few dozen Russkie subs. Theyre
out there all right, and theyre transmitting.
Of course they are. I just cant find
them. They have to be in the high frequency range
... somewhere between 3,000 to 30,000 kilocycles ... but
Ive covered every frequency used for the past
thirty years or so by Russian subs, surface craft, and
maybe even life rafts ... and not even a smell of a
transmission.

Commander Petersen scratched his head, along with
the rest of us. I should qualify that. Commander Petersen
never scratched his head exactly like the rest of
us. He was inclined to baldness, had a skin disease
which was to him, I am sure, a constant irritant, and
when he scratched his head, numerous obscene flakes
emerged from his scalp, and he then carefully removed
them from under his fingernails with a small pocket-knife
blade, and ate them. It was hard to concentrate on any
conversation with Commander Petersen when he was eating
his dandruff. As the Head of Operations he was our
immediate boss, but nobody took him seriously. He had
long since been promoted beyond his level of competence,
and would not have dreamed of making a decision without
first consulting the senior chiefs. Petersen was
later transferred to NSA and kicked upstairs into a
policy-making billet where he could do little harm. No
good field man paid the slightest attention to official
policy. The rules of the game in the field were
formulated around experience and balls enough to follow
gut-level instincts. We all understood the
risk-and-reward factor of such a course of action: guess
right and you were a hero; guess wrong and you were
crucified. Blindly follow the directives of a Petersen,
and you were forgotten.

But, at least in this one instance, Commander Petersen
was correct. We all agreed that the Soviet subs had to be
communicating with their Fleet H.Q. in some manner.
Gorshkov didnt trust his sub commanders any more
than had his predecessors. Historically they had always
been required to check in at least once daily. If they
were in foreign waters that could expand to four times a
day. There were a lot of Russian subs out there,
and that translated into one hell of a lot of signals
bouncing off the ionosphere, day and night. And now,
nothing. The Naval Security Group, and the National
Security Agency, were very concerned, and we field guys
were the recipients of that concern or, one might even
say, anger. Where were they? We didnt
know. Well, find them!

I had been stationed in Turkey for about one year, on a
three-year tour of duty. We maintained a number of
military stations throughout that country, and one of
these was Karamursel, an Air Force base without
aircraft (Air Force Intelligence), located some hundred
miles southeast of Istanbul. The primary function at Karamursel
was to monitor, by means of massive antenna fields, any
electronic emission from Turkeys Big Bear neighbor
to the north and east, as well as any transmissions from
Soviet fleet units, surface or subsurface. Special
attention was focused on major Soviet missile sites, such
as that massive one at Tyuratam. By monitoring their
transmissions we were able to determine beforehand (by
utilizing a number of complex analytical processes) when
a missile was to be launched, what type it was, and its
probable destination. By maintaining such monitoring
stations around the world, we could detect and analyze
the special types of transmissions associated with
specific types of missiles: short range, medium range or
long range. If an unusual amount of long-range missiles
were detected in the preparation stage, then we had time
to take defensive measures. If it came down to hard
ball, we would also have time to launch a preemptive
strike. We hoped. Karamursel was important,
and the details of its operation very, very Top Secret. A
small corner of the station housed a Naval Security Group
detachment. I was the Chief-in-Charge of the NSG
intercept operations section.

As far as my real boss, Captain Frank V. Mason, was
concerned, I was the guy responsible for losing the
Russian subs. I was also the guy responsible for
finding them again.

Captain Mason (then Commander Mason) had also been my
commanding officer some years earlier at the Naval
Communications Station, Guam, Marianas Islands. My son
was born there, and Mason and I together celebrated his
birth. We were old friends, so we could talk man to man
in a manner unusual between enlisted and commissioned
ranks. It was Mason who arranged for my transfer to
Skaggs Island Communications Station outside Napa,
California, following Guam, for specialized training, and
then to Turkey, to coincide with his takeover there. He
had recommended me for a commission; I was his boy.
I was letting him down. He wanted to know why.

I said, Captain, I dont know why. I agree
with you that they are transmitting, but if they are it
has to be a burst signal. That is
nothing new, by the way. The Germans used it towards the
end of World War Two. They recorded standard
Morse-code signals, then compressed them and sent them
out in bursts of a few seconds or less. We lost the
German subs then, and weve lost the Russians subs
now. Given time and enough technological expertise
one might expect to eventually DF (direction find) a
signal of some sixty seconds ... although highly unlikely
... but if Ivan is using a burst of under a second, which
I suspect he is, we will never DF it, and even if we find
it, we cant break it. You know as well as I
do that they dont send position reports in any code
breakable. It will probably turn out to be a
one-time-pad sort of thing, and if we dont have the
key we sure as hell cant break the code. And
get a DF on a signal of one second or less? Forget
it! I am doing all I can, Captain. If he is
there, I will find him, but that isnt going to do
us a hell of a lot of good, because you will never locate
him. Unless, of course you can tell me how we
direction find from a recording! The captain
and I both got a good laugh out of that one.
Dreamland.

It was Christmas, 1960, when I
finally found the lost Soviet submarines. It happened by
accident. I had been hearing a scratchy sound
for some time on various monitored circuits, but had
passed it over as some kind of an anomaly, a spurious
emission ... whatever. It was sort of like a burst
of static ... but not quite. Then, one day, I made a
sonograph-enlarged picture of another signal that
happened to have one of these scratchy sounds almost on
top of it.

Years earlier at Skaggs island what we did primarily was
to record and analyze Soviet radio transmissions.
Everything was signal coded, naturally, so the trick was
to break the signal codes in order to read
the Soviet military or diplomatic or whatever type of
correspondence. In the process we used what was called a
sonograph machine, which utilized a large drum around
which a photographic type of paper was hand wound by the
operator for each signal to be analyzed. On playback of a
recorded signal, the structure or positive-negative bauds
of the signal was imprinted and enlarged for inspection
by the analyst. That work required 20/20 vision and
the patience of Job. Once we broke a signal code,
which entailed figuring out from the baud formations
their equivalent letters in the Russian Cyrillic
alphabet, we sent this information to the National
Security Agency. NSA engineers were then able to
construct machines that could read out these messages
just as did the Soviet machines. When NSA began to read
Soviet traffic in volume, they passed on relevant
excerpts to military or political end users. Good
information could not be obtained over long periods of
time. Like ourselves, the Soviets changed signal codes
frequently. Then it was back to the drawing
board and start all over again; vital, boring work.

It was the sonograph machine that enabled me to locate
and analyze the scratchy signal. I
spread it out and took a closer look. Ill be
damned! It had bauds! Tiny bauds; the most
compressed signal that I had ever encountered ... but
bauds. It was a man-made signal, and it obviously
was not one of ours. Gotcha! It was a
burst signal, and it had to be a Russian sub.
It just had to be!

We fired the recording directly to the National Security
Agency, and they were ecstatic! All was
forgiven. NSA put their best analysts on it and
instructed us to concentrate on obtaining as many
recordings of this new signal as possible. And
suddenly we (and other Naval Security Group intercept
stations) began to find them all over the spectrum.
Scratchy signals were music to our ears ... now
that we knew what to listen for. As we obtained better
recordings, I measured them carefully and deduced that
the signal had a trigger heading, probably
meant to activate a Soviet recording device. The
trigger was a series of bauds at 345 cycles per second,
followed by a series of bauds at 142 cps. Next came
the obvious text of the message. NSA confirmed our
suspicions shortly. The subs were back! They had, of
course, been there all the time.

Captain Mason received a Letter of Commendation from the
National Security Agency (he was bucking for flag rank),
and I received a Letter of Appreciation from Captain
Mason (I was bucking for a commission). We were
buddies again.

We had found the Soviet burst signal, but now the
question was, What can we do about it?
Even before NSA put their best code experts and computers
to work trying to break the text, I knew that it was
unbreakable. If we could read the text of a position
report, we would obviously know the exact location of the
submarine. The Soviets would never use a repeating or
rotating code on such a transmission. There is an
old saying in the code business: Whatever man can
make, man can break. That was true in most
cases, but if you used a one-time-pad or a random
scrambler device, the code was breakable only if you were
in physical possession of the key. Fat
chance. Our only hope, I realized, was to devise a
means to locate the transmitters by direction finders.
With existing technology, that was impossible. A
new concept was required.

The reason a spy tried to get on and off the air as
quickly as possible was because he knew, as we all knew,
that it takes time to get a bearing on any
transmission. One direction finder will give you
only the direction from which the signal is
emanating. It does not tell you how far away the
transmitter is. Three direction finders zeroing in
on the signal will give you a triangulation, and the
approximate location of the transmitter. A number
of direction finders will give you a multiangulation and
a much closer location of the transmitter. Thats
what we needed. But the typical burst signal was on
the air for less than a second. That was okay for the
operator at a Soviet receiving station, since his
triggering device would automatically turn on his
recorder. Once recorded, the operator had all the time in
the world to feed the signal into a decoding machine
which contained the key to translate the coded
bauds into Cyrillic alphabet and thence to Russian plain
language. We could (and did) build a triggering device to
record the signal, but that left us with nothing more
than an unbreakable code.

Since direction finders didnt have time to
get a live bearing, our only hope was to devise a means
whereby we could obtain a bearing after the fact
from a recorded signal. That had never been done before.
I didnt believe that it could be done, but I was
wrong. NSA engineers did exactly that during a crash
program on a par (almost) with the Oak Ridge development
of the atomic bomb during World War Two. Within months
after intercepting the first Soviet burst signal, we had
stations set up and operating to detect, record and
direction find Soviet submarines. At first this was
limited to areas of primary strategic importance, but
soon expanded to cover every body of water in the world.

In common with most great discoveries, the concept was,
in retrospect, basically simple: it consisted of
constructing huge circular antenna fields in areas around
the world which would be able to well receive
transmissions from critical bodies of water in which
Soviet submarines normally operated. These antennae were
connected to large banks of receivers, tuned to narrow
bandwidths which overlapped and covered the entire
spectrum that the submarines might conceivably use. When
a receiver encountered a trigger on a burst signal, a
wide (two inch) sixty-inch-per-second recorder switched
on immediately andrecorded the signal, along with a
marker, indicating the time to the millisecond that the
signal was intercepted. Since the antenna field was
circular, and divided into segments every few feet, it
was also possible to determine, tangentially, the general
direction from which that signal had been received.
When combined with two or more other intercepts which
provided a triangulation or multiangulation indicating
the general direction from which the signal had emanated,
one was able to determine, after the fact, the
approximate location of the submarine.

Later, when we had obtained ample space at our site
locations to construct separate antenna fields for both
intercept stations and direction-finding stations, we
were afforded the luxury of comparing notes between the
two to obtain even more precise evaluations of direction.
Ample space on site was a prime consideration since,
besides the large antenna fields, the space required for
the reception and recording equipment covered an area as
large as a full-sized New York apartment, and had to be
fully air conditioned, since the receivers in those days
still used vacuum tubes, and generated considerable heat.
Land area sufficient for construction of a base,
with housing and other facilities for the operational
personnel, had to be taken into account. Large power
plants and ancillary units had to be installed. The
project was immense in scope, and was classified Top
Secret: CODEWORD. That codeword, which designated the
entire program, was BORESIGHT.

What I am saying here is so outdated that it is no longer
classified, or shouldnt be. HF (high frequency)
systems such as this have been made obsolete by VHF (very
high frequency) and UHF (ultra high frequency) satellite
communications technology. The U.S. Navy, for
example now uses the SSIXS (submarine satellite
information exchange system) for communications between
its submarines and shore stations. Other nations have
their own versions of this sophisticated and extremely
secure communications system. So what I have been saying
is ancient history. Interesting and, Im sure, never
before revealed, but history nonetheless. The BORESIGHT
system which I have just described is now as outdated as
the Model-T Ford. It was, however, extremely critical as
a factor in solving the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But back in 1961 we were in the experimental stage
regarding BORESIGHT, and we had to train operators at
outlying stations what to look for, and how to analyze
the signals when they received them. You couldnt
mail them a tape, and of course you couldnt
describe anything by telephone or radio. The tapes
containing examples of burst signals had to be hand
carried. That meant by armed courier, with the tape in a
briefcase attached to his arm by lock and chain. In other
words that meant me, and others like me, who knew the
signal first hand and could train operators in the field.
During the next few years I circled the globe many times
helping to install BORESIGHT stations.

In early 1962 I was notified that I had been selected for
a commission in the United States Navy. All those years
of correspondence courses, night school, and hard work at
my profession had finally paid off. I was directed
to report to the LDO School, Newport, Rhode Island, in
August, 1962, for fork and knife training,
where they would teach me how to act like an officer and
a gentleman. But I actually received my commission and
ensigns bars in Turkey on July 1. Following LDO
School, I was assigned to the NSA for
duty.

National Security
Agency, Fort Meade,
Maryland 1962-1965

Upon reporting in at NSA I was assigned a minor desk in
Section A22, the Soviet Submarine or, effectively now,
the BORESIGHT section. As the only man in the section
with any actual BORESIGHT field-operational experience, I
encountered a great deal of confusion and
misunderstanding about what the equipment could and
couldn't do. We brought in other field-experienced
personnel, and eventually worked into a competent
BORESIGHT-Control headquarters.

In September 1962, our U-2 over-flights finally confirmed
what had been suspected: the Soviets were installing
missiles in Cuba. As far as I know, that's all the
American public ever heard about. I'm not sure that this
has ever been officially acknowledged, but I can assure
you that there was a Cuban Submarine Crisis going on
simultaneously. We had received evidence of Soviet
submarine-pen construction in Cienfuegos, Cuba. How much
of this came from air surveillance and how much from
on-site penetration would be pure speculation on my part,
but we were advised by reliable sources that it was so.
Soviet submarines with potential long-range
missile-launching capabilities (boomers), stationed that
close to U.S. shores, with the resultant increased
ability to range up and down our coasts, posed a much
greater threat than medium-range fixed missiles in
Cuba. That danger had to be eliminated at all
costs. We were told to maximize efforts to locate the
position of every Soviet submarine possible. We did so,
and started to get hit after hit on BORESIGHT.

In late October we
obtained BORESIGHT fixes, and later visual sightings, of
four SovietFoxtrot-class attack boats converging on
Cuba. We suspected more on the way. That's
when my boss, Commander [McPherson], who was Chief of
Section A22 (Soviet Submarine Section) at the NSA, was
called to the White House. The president and his inner
circle had previously been briefed on BORESIGHT of
course, but in light of these new developments they
wanted an up-to-date confirmation of just how good it
was, and a technical explanation of precisely how it
worked. Should the U.S. decide to blockade Cuba, a Wolf
Pack of near-silent Foxtrot submarines carrying
nuclear-tipped torpedoes could spell disaster ... unless
we could find them.

Commander [McPherson] was a sharp, competent, naval
officer, but he only knew BORESIGHT second hand, mostly
from me. In fact, he and I together had worked up his
presentation. Operationally he was on solid ground, but
he was a bit intimidated by some ofthe technical aspects.

"I'm sure I've got it, but I don't want to get hit
with a surprise technical question and have to tell the
President that I'll get back to him on that later.
You'd best come along Reed, just in case."

A lowly ensign in the U.S. Navy invited to the White
House? Unheard of. What the hell, I
thought, before I was an ensign I was an old grizzled
Navy Chief. Nobody screws around with a Navy Chief
... right? Sounds tough, but to tell the truth, I
was as nervous as a seaman recruit on the first day of
boot camp.

The briefing was actually held
in the "little" White House, or annex, off to
the right side of the White House proper. I was
disappointed that it was not to be held in the Oval
Office, but when I saw the size of the crowd attending I
realized why it was not. The Oval Office is in fact a
small office in size.

Commander [McPherson] gave a very good presentation, but
as the briefing progressed and the questions became more
technical and precise, I was called upon frequently to
amplify. I had brought along charts and graphs which I
had previously prepared for use in a BORESIGHT manual
which I was in the process of writing. Most of the
questions came from the panel of technical experts from
various agencies of the Defense Department. But there
were also occasional queries from a group of quiet
"grey" men in the outer gallery. I didn't know
who most of them were, and did not especially care. We
were here to brief the President. If he wanted someone
else present that was his decision to make. I later
discovered who the grey men were after reading a book
by Robert Kennedy (written in 1967 and published in
1969) titled: Thirteen Days. Robert Kennedy was
present at the briefing as well as the other members of
President Kennedys Advisory Committee (ExComm),
which in Robert Kennedy's own words included:

"... Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara; Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency John McCone; Secretary of the
Treasury Douglas Dillon; President Kennedy's
advisor on national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy;
Presidential Counsel Ted Sorenson; Under Secretary
of State George Ball; Deputy Under Secretary of
State U. Alexis Johnson; General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Edward Martin, Assistant
Secretary of State for Latin America; Llewellyn Thompson
as the advisor on Russian affairs; Roswell
Gilpatraic, Deputy Secretary of Defense; and,
intermittently at various times: Lyndon B. Johnson, Adlai
Stevenson, Ambassador to the United Nations; Ken
O'Donnell, Special Assistant to the President; and
Don Wilson, who was Deputy Director of the United States
Information Agency. This was the group that met, talked,
argued, and fought together during that critical period
of time. From this group came the recommendations from
which President Kennedy was ultimately to select his
course of action ... The general feeling ...
was that some form of action was required ... I passed a
note to the President: 'I now know how Tojo felt
when he was planning Pearl Harbor.'"

President Kennedy asked very few
questions. He appeared to me to be tired. Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara, a man whom I had always admired
and respected, seemed to be pretty much in charge ... at
least at the beginning of the briefing ... but as we
began to cover the more detailed technical aspects of
BORESIGHT, he looked like he was falling asleep; head
down, almost on his chest. We had put in a hell of
a lot of work on this thing, and I was annoyed that
SECDEF didn't seem all that interested. I learned
that my fears were totally misplaced. When the
presentation concluded, McNamara's head came up. The
first question (or rather review) came from him. He said,
"Now let me see if I understand this ..."
and proceeded with the most precise and comprehensive
explanation of BORESIGHT that I have ever heard. He had
memorized just about everything that we had presented in
a two-hour briefing. And he had the ability to make
even bauds and bits and radio-wave-propagation theory
sound interesting. Robert McNamara was (and probably
still is) one scary guy.

As we were leaving the
conference room Commander [McPherson] said to me in an
aside, Now what do you suppose that was all about?
I knew what he meant: SECDEF engineers must surely have
known how BORESIGHT worked. They shouldnt
have to be told that again. In hindsight, I think
what they really wanted to know, and what the President
had to be assured of, was: What did a BORESIGHT position
report translate to in terms of precise target
location? Was it 100 yards, or 500 yards, or five
miles? A big difference to one of our ASW
weapons. If this came down to a shooting war, could
we take out one or two of the subs moving in Cuban
waters, or all of them, if needed, with one concentrated
strike?

The point that we made to them, over and over, was that
we had a very limited number of BORESIGHT stations
installed and operating. We would be lucky to get a
simple triangulation fix. That would put them in the
right ballpark, but it would not guarantee (without luck)
the precise base pad. Once in the ballpark, it was up to
their ASW forces to find the base runner. Given more
locations, which would provide us with multiangulation
fixes, maybe six or seven DF line bearings converging on
the target, we could tell them Who was on first and What
was on second.

The Cuban Missile Crisis:
My son, William Craig Reed, spent six years aboard
nuclear submarines (late 70s and early 80s)
as a fire control technician, espionage photographer, and
SEAL-trained navy diver and was involved in the most
devastating collision between a U.S. and Soviet submarine
during the Cold War (documented in the Writers
Press book CRAZY IVAN now available at Barnes &
Noble). Together, we compiled a precise day-to-day
account of U.S. Naval operations during the Cuban Missile
Crisis, including the vital role that BORESIGHT played in
bringing that operation to a successful conclusion. In
the details of those day-to-day operations of the U.S.
Naval ASW forces, we point out time and again how the
ships of our fleet were directed to the precise locations
of various Soviet submarines. They had made the mistake
of raising their antennae and sending off position
reports by the burst signals that they were convinced
were undetectable, and BORESIGHJT nailed them.

There was no militant exchange involving Soviet
submarines, because by this time Khrushchev was having
second thoughts. His Fleet Commander, Admiral Gorshkov,
continued to assure him that the Foxtrots, operating on
battery power, were invisible. They could not be
detected by the Americans! But Khrushchev was
receiving reports hourly from his submarine commanders
contradicting this assurance. His invisible
Foxtrots were being prosecuted around the clock by U.S.
ASW forces to the point that they were often forced to
surface under threat of depth-charge attack. Khrushchev
began to realize that he could no longer back up his
threat to "sink the American naval vessels"
should they try to effect a quarantine of Cuba. On the
contrary, his Foxtrots were in imminent danger of being
sunk! The deciding factor in this exchange was, of
course, BORESIGHT.

Admiral Anderson later commented in his unpublished
memoirs:

"... we concentrated our whole area
antisubmarine coverage to the point that every Soviet
submarine in the western Atlantic was made to surface at
least once, or several times in some instances. I had
excellent cooperation from [Admiral] Dennison in that
regard, and I did follow very intensely our successes in
that respect. One incident occurred. We knew where
one of these particular submarines was located. We
had that information from the most highly classified
intelligence that the Navy had at that time [BORESIGHT].
We were very anxious to preserve that intelligence, and
very few people knew about this type of
intelligence. We had a destroyer [USS Charles P.
Cecil, DDR 835] sitting on top of this submarine [Foxtrot
pendant number 911]. One evening, McNamara,
Gilpatric [sic], and an entourage of his press
people came down to flag plot and, in the course of
their interrogations, they asked why that destroyer was
out of line. I sort of tried to pass it off because
not only were there some of McNamara's people there who
were not cleared for this information, but some of my own
watch officers were not cleared for it in the general
area of flag plot. After some discussion, I said to
McNamara - he kept pressing me - 'come inside,' and I
took him into a little inner sanctuary where only people
who had clearance for that particular type of classified
information were permitted, and I explained the whole
thing to him and to his satisfaction as well."

At 10:30 AM on October 27, 1962, Secretary of State Dean
Rusk turned to McNamara and spoke words that would make
history, "We're eyeball to eyeball and I think
the other fellow just blinked." All Soviet
ships headed toward the quarantine line had stopped or
turned toward the Soviet Union. The Essex received
her next orders: do not fire, allow the Soviet ships
every opportunity to turn around!

What made the other fellow
blink? Volumes have been written trying to answer that
question. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali suggest
in their book: One Hell of a Gamble, that it was
because of a Russian immigrant from the Balkans named
Johnny Prokov, a bartender at Tap Room in the National
Press Club, Washington, D.C.. They contend that Prokov
passed to Anatoly Gorski, a KGB officer, information that
he had overheard during a conversation at the bar between
two celebrated American journalists, Robert Donovan and
Warren Rogers, both correspondents of the New York Herald
Tribune. Apparently Donovan was supposed to fly
south that very night to cover the operation to
capture Cuba, which is expected to start the next day ...
The story was that the KGB passed that information
immediately to Moscow, and Khrushchev had it on his desk
within hours. He was finally convinced that Kennedy was
serious about going to war over Cuba, and that was why he
backed down. Khrushchev backed down because of a
conversation overheard at a bar? That smacks of a
pretty desperate bid to find an answer.

To this day, I contend that
Khrushchev almost surely received and understood a
message from Kennedy in words to the effect that:

We can find your boats, you cant sink our
blockading ships with your Foxtrots, and you wont
be able to hide your submarines in Cuba. We know about
the submarine base that you are building in Cienfuegos,
but it will do you no good, because we will make sure
that no Soviet missile-capable submarine ever gets near
Cuba again!

Khrushchev knew as well as
Kennedy that if we had their submarines pinpointed, the
ball game was over. The land-based medium-range missiles
sited in Cuba could damage a considerable segment of the
United States, but the use thereof would result in
massive retaliation against both Cuba and the Soviet
Union. He stood to lose all of his Foxtrot subs now
converging on Cuba, and he would lose his submarine pens
in Cuba from which he had planned to service
nuclear-powered boomers in the future off the shores of
the U.S..

Khrushchev fully expected to lose the fixed missile sites
in Cuba during the first missile exchange, but he had
counted on the long-range missiles aboard his boomers to
tip the balance, since those submarines (like the Foxtrot
under battery power) were heretofore considered to be
undetectable. Suddenly, it appeared that none of his
submarines ... not only in Cuban waters, but perhaps
around the world ... were undetectable! He was
playing a losing hand. It was poker that Kennedy was
playing, but it was good poker:

I can visualize the scene: Khrushchev bet
Cuba. Kennedy said, "Call and raise. We're
going all the way on this one Nikita," and pushed
the world into the pot. It was the highest stake
poker game ever played. Khrushchev threw his cards on the
table and said, "Fold!" His
ace-in-the-hole had been exposed.

Khrushchev discovered to his
regret that he was now dealing with a new Kennedy, not at
all the Kennedy of the Paris fiasco. This was a man who
had assuredly grown into his presidency, and a president
who was obviously backed by a United States Congress
ready and willing to risk World War Three. The Soviet
Politburo, on the other hand, was not, and prominent
members thereof were pressuring Khrushchev to ease
off. This was a reckless game that he was
playing! They did not wish to risk all-out war at
this time. Khrushchev was left with with no other choice
but to turn his ships around or face World War Three ...
and probably a bullet.

And World War Three it would have been had there been one
small miscalculation by either side. After that
hair-raising confrontation and a short cooling-off period
of rational exchange, Khrushchev agreed to pull out all
offensive-capable weapons systems from Cuba in exchange
for an assurance that the U.S. would not launch or back
an invasion, and would also remove missile sites in
Turkey which were targeted on the Soviet Union. The Cuban
Missile (and Submarine) Crisis was over. I'm sure Kennedy
didn't trade off any BORESIGHT secrets to the Soviets,
because we used the equipment to good effect for some
years to follow, but I can't doubt that he told them the
exact number and the exact location of their submarines
in Cuban waters ... and probably elsewhere. How we knew
must have driven Ivan crazy! There is no doubt in
my mind that Kennedy did it right. We owe him.

There is also no doubt in my mind that two technological
breakthroughs, one called RADAR (developed by English
scientists for combat operations just prior to the German
aerial assault against Britain in September, 1940), and
one called BORESIGHT, were highly instrumental in
achieving victory in two of the most decisive world
conflicts of this century: the Battle of Britain, and the
Cuban Missile (submarine) Crisis, respectively. And
one should never forget the tenacity and the courage of
the British Bulldog and the Irish Wolfhound behind them.

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, BORESIGHT quickly
became the hottest program at the National Security
Agency. We had the full backing of SECDEF McNamara. He
insisted upon a crash program. We were to install
BORESIGHT in every corner of the Globe! He pressed our
allies for the use of choice locations in which to
install the large antenna fields required, and in which
also a secure environment obtained. Security was
paramount.

The remainder of 1962 and all of 1963 was a period of
system refinement and expansion. Major installations
included: Adak, Alaska; Kamiseya,
Japan; Guam; Pearl Harbor; Port
Lyautey, North Africa; Edzell, Scotland;
Cheltenham, England; Recife, Brazil; Winter
Harbor, Maine. These were backed up by a number of
secondaries, constantly expanding.

By 1964, BORESIGHT had been designated the number two
U.S. military priority, second only to the development of
U.S. Polaris ballistic-missile nuclear submarines. It
remained so closely guarded a secret for the next twenty
years or so, that nobody ever questioned publicly what
effect this program might have had in the crucial
final-day talks between President Kennedy and Soviet
Premier Khrushchev. How could they have? If there
had been so much as a rumor of BORESIGHT, the NSA, the
CIA, and even the President of the United States would
have sworn under oath that no such program had ever
existed. And nobody ever asked questions about the Cuban
Submarine Crisis either, since that also never
existed. Right?

But there are still a few of us around who know better,
including the former Secretary of Defense, Robert
McNamara. He knows the story about BORESIGHT and the
Cuban Submarine Crisis as well as I do. Ask him.

A more comprehensive account of the part that BORESIGHT
played in the Cuban Missile Crisis is offered in the new
book by W. Craig Reed and William Reed, titled: Crazy
Ivan, and now available from Barnes and Noble.com and Amazon.com

WILLIAM REED
William Reed, a retired mustang (up from the ranks) Naval
Intelligence officer worked for eleven years during his
career for the Naval Security Group and the National
Security Agency, primarily as a cryptanalyst and Turkish
linguist. From 1962 to 1965 he also worked
internationally for the NSA as a trouble shooter,
lecturer and briefer to Department of Defense and NATO
intelligence agencies. At the onset of the Cuban
Missile Crisis, Reed briefed President John F. Kennedy
regarding the Soviet submarine threat and the NSA
proposed solution thereof.

Following his naval retirement in 1967, Mr. Reed earned a
masters degree in history from the University of
San Diego and, while working on his doctorate in Spanish
Borderlands History, was the co-founder and president of
Frontier Heritage Press, Inc. of San Diego. He wrote
biographies of two famous South Western artists: Olaf
Wieghorst, (foreword by Senator Barry Goldwater) ,
Northland Press, Flagstaff, Arizona, 1969 (which won the
Wrangler award that year from the National Cowboy Hall of
Fame, Oklahoma City), and DeGrazia: The Irreverent Angel,
Frontier Heritage Press, 1971. San Diego.

Since his permanent retirement in Puerto Vallarta,
Jalisco, Mexico in 1972, Mr. Reed has written eight other
books which include: The Art of Living in Mexico, Wilkie
Publishing Co., 1974, Los Angeles; An Open Book:
John Huston (ghost writer), Alfred A. Knopf, 1980,
New York; Crazy Ivan (with son, W. Craig Reed: the
inside story of father-son Top Secret programs targeting
Soviet Submarines) Writers Club Press 2001,
Lincoln, NE; Tarzan: My Father (with Johnny
Weissmuller, Jr. and W. Craig Reed);
Sentenced to Life (Thematic condensation of his
two-volume Memoirs), and Mike Oliver's
Acapulco [with Mike Oliver: short personalized
history of Acapulco as seen through the eyes of
publisher-journalist Oliver for the past
fifty seven years] Writers Club Press
2001, Lincoln, NE.

In 1999 Reed started Reed Writing, Inc, with his
son, W. Craig Reed, a company specializing in biography,
military history and memoirs. Research
and writing assistance offered to new
authors.
Web Site: www.reedwriting.com

W. CRAIG REED
W. Craig Reed served six years in the U.S. Navy as a Fire
Control Technician First Class, SEAL-Trained Navy Diver
and Special Operations Photographer, deployed on nuclear
fast attack submarines. Mr. Reed was the recipient
of Navy Expeditionary medals in relation to the
completion of several Top Secret operations. During
his tour of naval duty he received Marksmanship and Sharp
Shooter rifle and small arms medals and the Navy Good
Conduct medal. Mr. Reed earned a degree in
marketing after receiving an Honorable Discharge in
1981. He has published several articles in leading
high-technology publications and has received numerous
industry awards for advertising and marketing
programs. He currently provides communications,
sales and marketing expertise for high-technology
companies. wc@reedwriting.com, Web site:
www.reedwriting.com